We have recently wrapped up on our biggest place brand project to date with Hemingway Design and For the Love of Place, working with the City of York to identify and develop a distinctive brand narrative for a city which is currently seen as a destination for tourism and heritage but arguably little else.

Fáilte Ireland appointed CTConsults to conduct a feasibility study to evaluate options & opportunities, and make final costed recommendations on the optimum solution for the development of a National Online Distribution Strategy for Visitor Experiences, such as Attractions, Activities and Festivals & Events.

Examples of Activities include sightseeing tours, walking tours, land-based and water-based adventure and sporting activities etc. Examples of Attractions include Museums, Cultural and Historical Attractions, Heritage Centres etc. Examples of Festivals / Events include St Patrick’s Festival.

Nationally-funded place-based projects – Discover England Fund, Great Place, Creative People and Places spring to mind – are important devices to galvanise places and clusters, but the trick is always to ensure that when the funding runs out, the momentum does not. Not all maintain momentum, but by taking a longer-term vision and committing to it, Bristol & Bath have been able to progress more than most. 

Their Cultural Destinations programme connected two neighbouring but very different city offers and 28 partners. We started by conducting a ‘root & branch’ destination audit. That identified key priorities and opportunities to focus the collective energy.

A young, recently emerged tourism destination, Northern Ireland is playing rapid catch-up. The success of recent capital developments like Titanic Belfast and Seamus Heaney’s Homeplace, plus the global popularity of Game of Thrones, has indicated a genuine visitor interest and connection. 

The big opportunity lay in what they simply couldn’t do 25 years ago – being dynamic, strategic and creative in partnerships – transforming good heritage into genuinely distinctive experiences found nowhere else. We found a warm, edgy and contemporary personality emerging

We were appointed by Visit Leeds to deliver a product audit and additional development support to identify opportunities to create bookable products for the tourism market. This had a number of delivery facets to it:

1. A detailed product audit that mapped and evaluated the product portfolio of the Visitor Economy in Leeds – no assumptions, except for modest budgets;
2. An educational programme of stakeholder engagement and support that encouraged the development of the quality and depth of the city’s visitor offer to attract new national and international audiences;
3. A suite of themed tours and itineraries that can be used across consumer and trade activity – spotting gaps, categorised in a market-facing manner, and designing cluster-based projects to maximise potential;
4. A travel trade tool kit to assist Visit Leeds with its programme of travel trade engagement.

In international terms, the north of England is a viable destination, but the product offer, connectivity and infrastructure might beg to differ. How can the powerful cultural offers of some of the region’s great cities – Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull and NewcastleGateshead – come together in a way that is accessible and appealing to growing international visitor markets – especially millennials?

In 2015 London was announced as the most visited cultural destination in the world. No.1. Top dog. Job done? Not quite. London has always led by continually innovating and setting cultural trends. Pausing isn’t an option. 90% of London’s visitors follow the path of least resistance (but most congestion) and head to the top 20 attractions. London is so much more, both centrally and when striking out a little further. If encouraging people to explore, London has to then be navigable so that visitors can find the great stuff, the new stuff, in a city where Time Out lists 150,000 events across 55,000 venues daily.

How can a city’s position as a cultural tourism destination be strengthened in the lead up to 2021, and in the process equip its main partners (21 in this case) with the skills, knowledge, experience, and confidence they will need to deliver integrated digital engagement strategies for culture and tourism?

Carrickfergus is a walled, medieval garrison town, with an intact Norman castle. This place holds many keys to understanding the Northern Ireland cultural heritage story. The invasion of William of Orange into Northern Ireland landed here – just one of the many stories of UK-wide significance – often fraught with contention and used to support sectarian agendas to the serious detriment of the town’s appeal to developers, investors and visitors, diminishing the community in the process. We were commissioned to look at a heritage-led tourism strategy, with the Castle at its heart.

Cheltenham, a charming town that often tops the ‘best places to live’ rankings, also has some outstanding cultural assets, notably its festivals – music, jazz, science and literature. It is also a gateway to the ever-popular Cotswolds, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and tourist hotspot since tourism was invented. If that is not enough, it hosts the biggest National Hunt horse-racing festival in the world, the Cheltenham Gold Cup Festival. However, its major festivals deliver programmes for a fraction of the year.

Torbay is an historic seaside resort – cheekily nicknamed the English Riviera! As a UNESCO Global Geopark, it unsurprisingly has some outstanding natural assets alongside its cultural venues and programmes. But how to knit these assets together into a cultural tourism strategy that works for the arts, hoteliers and fits in an events and attractions portfolio that has everything from an air show to a zoo, across a bay of three very distinct towns?